[XML-SIG] Expat 1.95.4

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

Matt G. writes:
 > If you're introducing incompatibilities, shouldn't you increment the major 
 > rev?  Non-incompatible new functionality should result in an increment of 
 > the minor revision - not the patch rev.  Otherwise, there's no systematic 
 > way to determine compatibility.

Er, I don't think I am.  My intent is to be cautious in case anything
crept in by accident.

 > ..or is there some sort of completely different versioning system
 > used for Python modules/packages?  I have a hard time imagining how
 > the problem could be solved any better than by the
 > 'COMPATIBILITY.FEATURES.FIXES' scheme, though.

I won't argue that, but there's also a substantial group of projects
that uses X.high-numbers.Z as the lead-in to X+1.0.0 (such as Expat),
and I don't expect that to change.

There are a lot of social forces at work when people discuss
versioning systems, as the Distutils-SIG determined early on.  Few
people are interested in having someone recommend a versioning scheme
to them, no matter how rational and useful.

 > BTW, it would be nice to see some shared-library style scheme, to
 > allow programs to use the most up-to-date of the compatible
 > installed versions of a given .py.  I was recently frustrated to
 > see that distutils doesn't really seem to support this model.

I'd be happy to see something along those lines added to distutils and
the coding style of Python programmers, but I don't have the time to
contribute to that myself.


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>
PythonLabs at Zope Corporation